“We assess that the Russian intelligence services will continue their efforts to disseminate false information via Russian state-controlled media and covert online personas about U.S. activities to encourage anti-U.S. political views,” the assessment reads.

Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats told the Senate Intelligence Committee that Russia was emboldened by its ability to influence the 2016 presidential election.

“There should be no doubt that Russia perceived that its past efforts as successful and views the 2018 U.S. midterm elections as a potential target for Russian midterm operations,” Coats said.

Russian President Vladimir Putin “is likely to increase his use of repression and intimidation to contend with domestic discontent over corruption, poor social services, and a sluggish economy with structural deficiencies,” according to the assessment.

It’s no secret that Russia has tried to influence elections around the world for many years.

But 2016 appeared to be banner year for the Russians when it came to the U.S. election.

FBI Director Christopher Wray, addressing a crowd of about 150 people at the National September 11 Memorial and Museum in New York, said he expects the U.S. to be better prepared to deal with threats in the 2018 and 2020 elections, Max Kutner of Newsweek reports.

That’s the good news.

The bad news: He says anticipates Russia will also be better prepared to go at it again.

“We know a lot more now than we did about all the different threats, whether it’s to our election systems or anything else,” the director said when asked about Russia. “I would expect that we would do better, but I also expect that our adversaries don’t just coast, right? They up their game, too.”

Still, the threat of a cyberattack appeared to discourage voters, who expressed much less confidence that their vote would count, according to exit polls.

“All the discussions this year about security gave states another measure of protection,” said Pamela Smith, president of Verified Voting, a non-partisan, non-profit organization that advocates for elections accuracy.

Some Republicans even called for a delay because of the potential of midterm elections swinging in favor of the GOP in November.

“Allowing Democratic senators, many of whom will likely have just been defeated at the polls, to confirm Holder’s successor would be an abuse of power that should not be countenanced,” Sen. Ted Cruz said.

Democrats urged Republicans to let Obama make his selection without the drama.

“This is going to be the first real test, whether it’s in the lame-duck or early in the new year, whether our Republican colleagues are going to continue to obstruct,” Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Thursday in an interview. “Every president deserves to have his attorney general.”

Republican presidential candidate Michelle Bachman told a group of Republican faithfuls on Oct. 28 that “Obama is allowing terror suspect groups to write the FBI’s terror training manual,” a wildly false statement, according to the Associated Press.

But that didn’t stop other Republican hopefuls from repeating the claims, reports the Associated Press in a story published on the Washington Post website. This past weekend primary candidate Newt Gingrich told a Des Moines, Iowa veterans’ forum that the Obama administration “issued instructions, for example, that in developing training papers on terrorism that no mention should be made of radical Islam.”

The latest, according to AP, was fellow candidate Rick Santorum’s statement, made to another Des Moine crowd, that Obama “actually ordered all references to Islam and Muslim sanitized out of our national security documents.”

The statement’s stem from FBI efforts to deal with problems that arose when it came to light that an FBI instructor was giving lectures highly critical of Islam. Investigating the matter, the FBI found a small amount of inappropriate material–suggestions that mainstream American Muslims are terrorist sympathizers, for example–and immediately got rid of it, AP reported.